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Posts tagged "Creative Cloud"

Lately posts have been a little thin. This past year the team has been heads down, focused on a new initiative that I’m excited to share with you.

History

As many may know, Adobe has used its own installer technology called RIBS for the past several years. RIBS was created to bind the individual products together when we first released Creative Suite and the technology is still used in todays Creative Cloud products.

We realize RIBS is not ideal for enterprise workflows and in order to deploy the software you are required to use either Creative Cloud Packager or it’s predecessor AAMEE. While those products offer features beyond their core competency of converting from RIBS to native installer such as the ability to specify update behaviour, pre-serialise, create update packages and license files, it is still an additional step IT need to take. Also in order to use CCP, you need both Mac and a Windows systems clean of other Adobe software and network connectivity, requiring IT to open firewall ports.

The Change

Now, Adobe will pre-populate packages for Creative Cloud for enterprise customers. When a user logs into the Adobe Enterprise Dashboard, they will go through the following process

Adobe entitlements are detected and packages will be created automatically,

When you select packages you can filter by “created automatically”

These Pre-Created packages will leverage the default and most common settings. Users can change certain settings such as language, update behaviour and for Windows, bit architecture,

Once satisfied with the packages and settings select “build”

The system will start building and downloading packages

It’s as simple as that !

Users can also, delete packages and can filter by package creator.

Future

The question I am sure that will arise is, why doesn’t Adobe just use native installers ?. It is a very valid question. As i mentioned RIBS allows you to deploy multiple products in the same binary but other advantages are limited to Adobe itself. This is changing and in the not so distant future I will go in to more detail about the changes that are being made to the RIBS installers to increase the benefit to end users.

The Team

Finally (I know long post) I was in Noida nearly two years ago when we sat down as a team and discussed this new direction. We discussed the pain points and how we could remove the packaging step for IT admins. Since then the team have worked tirelessly to make this a reality. We have many features still to implement to get this where we want but as a 2.0 release this is a huge step and I want to publicly thank each member of the team who worked crazy hours and put up with my stress levels.

Now the real question is, if you have a big launch at 6am is it too early for a celebration beer ?

It has been a little while since my last post. That does not mean that I have embraced the dream to retire to some remote island off Fiji or at least spend 6 months out of the year there. A place with no internet connectivity, and just a small shop to get supplies from and make a long distance phone call across a crackled line once a month to touch base with the outside world. I guess this would also mean I would have no need for my pedometer, smart watch, tech glasses, Bluetooth headphones, smart thermostat, smart smoke detector and most distressingly my smart crockpot. On reflection, it seems as though I have invested way too much in technology to ever lead a life of solitude and so with that settled, let’s get on to business.

Some of you will already have noticed that Creative Cloud Packager 1.5 is live and available to download. This release includes several under the hood changes as well as customer facing features.

-Creative Cloud Packager will allow customers also entitled to Premiere Elements for Mac, Photoshop Elements for Mac and Technical Communication Suite to package and deploy using Creative Cloud Packager. This is accomplished when you enter a license key for the relevant product in to the packager and we will fetch the product and present it for packaging.

We are genuinely excited about this release. Not that CCP 1.2 was not exciting, actually who am I kidding it was important in that it had some bug fixes but that’s not exciting is it ? Though maybe I am being presumptuous and their are people out there who just love a good bug fix. CCP 1.3 on the other hand brings some pretty exciting features and just to keep those aforementioned people happy we also have some bug fixes.

Support for archived versions: The Creative Cloud gives you access to the latest and greatest Adobe products but also access to previous or archived versions of products which is a very important aspect to many peoples workflows. CCP 1.3 now allows you to package the latest and greatest but also archived versions of applications beginning with CS6 era applications. They can be packaged together or separately depending on what your requirement is.

Support for Native application installers: In the past you would need to download separately from Adobe’s licensing website any applications that were native installers. In this release those applications are now downloaded directly from CCP.

Support for Proxy Auto Configuration (PAC) files: CCP will now honor PAC files that are used to provide proxy information.

RUM support for Feature Bearing Updates: This was a big one, you can now install FB updates by invoking RUM or by going to the “Help” menu of the product itself, this was not previously possible for Creative Cloud Enterprise customers.

As promised there are some important bug fixes in this release. Some customers where having issues with imaging when non Creative Cloud products where included in the image, this should now be fixed. Customers using AUSST where experiencing an intermittent issue whereby downloads where timing out. We have now updated the version of AUSST carried in the CCP 1.3 download and also on Devnet to resolve these issues.

What do you need to do to get this amazing new release you ask ? Why just re-launch CCP and you will be prompted to self update.

For more information on this release please visit the Creative Cloud Packager help page

Finally a special thank you to all the participants who helped test out the Pre Release version. Your input as always is incredibly valuable.

I’ve been retired from blogging for almost six months, which in Internet Years is like six millennia. This whole post should be simply a Vine clip, right? You probably missed my retirement party when I retired from blogging. The guys all chipped in on a gold-toned watch. The inscription on the back “Did you notice the green squiggly lines?” was particularly touching.

What could draw me out of retirement? The fame? The money? Well seeing how I saw neither of those while I was blogging I’d have to say no. It was actually a blog post that my esteemed and ridiculously talented co-worker Terry White wrote entitled “5 Myths About Adobe Creative Cloud” a couple of months ago.

It is a good post, and features a photo of Nessie, the famed cryptid from Scotland. Which instantly makes me think of the show “In Search Of” which I loved as I child and honestly, creeped me out as well. Myths about Bigfoot or UFOs are still cool in my book, but myths about products…not so much. I always considered myself more Mulder than Scully but here I am dispelling myths, shining my over-powered flashlight on the the dark shadows of misinformation and confusion that IT have about the Creative Cloud.

1) Creative Cloud is virtualized or streamed

Wait, isn’t that pretty much the same as Terry’s #1 myth “I don’t want to run my Applications in a web browser!”??? Yes, but mine is phrased slightly differently, which in the world of blogging is legit. Seriously though, this gets brought up continually and it is worth mentioning again that the Creative Cloud is a new method of distributing our creative desktop applications but they are still applications that are installed and run the old school way. They still take up GBs of your hard drive. Oh wait, I wasn’t supposed to highlight that fact. Shrug. But you get it. Our beefy products like Photoshop work best installed on systems with lots of RAM and a modern GPU. Now, it has to be stated that virtualization technology is rapidly evolving and advancements like virtualization of the GPU is just plain awesome. But, the Creative Cloud at present remains a way to download the software from the Cloud, not run the applications in a browser or thin client.

2) Creative Cloud can’t be deployed

What? After spending the last 3-4 years trying to do right by the IT community by making packaging tools like AAMEE, licensing tools like APTEE, and updating solutions like AUSST and RUM do you really think we’d roll out a major offering and forget about the IT deployment infrastructure your organization has invested in? Seriously?

Now let me explain, briefly, that we have three different types of the Creative Cloud and I believe some of the misconceptions about deployment have been rooted in the lack of clarity about the different types of the Creative Cloud. If you are an individual, a freelance designer or one-person video production shop, then you can buy the Creative Cloud for individuals. They are admins on their systems. They are their own IT, Procurement, Accounting, etc. No deployment needed, obviously.

Now the next offering is tailored for small businesses or small groups within a large organization, they might want to look at Creative Cloud for teams. An ideal number of folks would be like 5 to 30. Let’s say it is a small game developer that buys 25 seats of Creative Cloud for teams, and they have an IT guy who has setup a deployment solution to manage their Macs. The IT admin would log into the Creative Cloud for teams admin portal on the Creative Cloud website and they see an interface for inviting Team members via email. They’ll also see a Deployment section and they’ll be able to download the new Creative Cloud Packager 1.0. This new tool allows the IT admin to download the Creative Cloud desktop applications and their updates and package them. So unlike AAMEE, it doesn’t point to locally downloaded media like the ginormous Master Collection but rather the IT admin can cherry pick applications they want to download to package. See, better! I’d like to take credit for this but I am no longer over the IT tools, so hats off to Karl Gibson and the crew formally known as the “AAMEE crew!”

A 1.1 version of the Creative Cloud Packager is due shortly after the new set of Creative Cloud applications are released next month. The 1.1 version will work for both Creative Cloud for teams and for Creative Cloud for enterprise. The Creative Cloud for enterprise is the third type of the Creative Cloud and is meant for larger institutions who need higher levels of control.

3) Organizations can’t control the frequent updates

One of the coolest parts of the Creative Cloud is that we are no longer waiting for annual or 18 month cycles to get new functionality from the products. If the engineers have a cool new feature in Illustrator they release it to the Creative Cloud members as soon as it has gone through the regular QE process. That team doesn’t have to wait for a year to have it be a part of a new boxed copy of the Creative Suite or wait for a marketing event. Nope, bam! Into the hands of their users straight away. Sounds great for individuals or people in design studios with mohawks right? But what about my enterprise production environment? What about my strict policy of evaluating all updates before they are released? Nothing changes. The updates are available via the Creative Cloud Packager and can be packaged at the IT admin’s discretion. Same level of control.

4) Adobe IDs aren’t for us

The way the Creative Cloud for individuals and teams versions work is that the applications, services and storage use a licensing/authentication process that involves an Adobe ID. For Creative Cloud for teams we have an admin portal that allows the IT admin or production manager the ability to send out email invites and those users have to create Adobe IDs in order to sign into the Creative Cloud (i.e. the applications or at creative.adobe.com.) The end users who are using Creative Cloud for teams have to obviously be online to authenticate with their Adobe IDs. Now that is the Creative Cloud for teams which stated above is ideal for small organizations.

Frankly, this doesn’t scale for large organizations for hundreds or thousands of users. It doesn’t work for organizations like video production places with offline workstations. Larger organizations want to use their own identity systems (like Active Directory or LDAP) and do not want to use Adobe IDs to identify their organization’s users who have access to the Creative Cloud. Of course. This is why the Creative Cloud for enterprise offering has this in mind. Presently if you purchase Creative Cloud for enterprise then the IT admin has the same flexibly to package and deploy the creative desktop applications without use of Adobe IDs. What? Yep. How are the applications licensed? A contract-defined expiring serial number. A serial number? Boring, right? Old school. Status quo. Status Quo.

Now there are a lot of great aspects of the Creative Cloud that go beyond just the core applications. It is essential that we provide this functionality to our enterprise customers. We are working on the ability for your organization to control login into the Creative Cloud using your authentication infrastructure by using Single Sign-On authentication via SAML 2.0. This will allow for the use of the cloud functionality including storage and services. I’ll come back and do an entire blog that outlines our strategy around supporting SSO and will separately write an entry explaining all the advantages you and your users will have once they are signing into the Creative Cloud for enterprise. Some really cool stuff. Are we aware that not every enterprise customer is ready to support SSO or use a different authentication method? Yes. Will we support other methods of authentication down the road? Yes. But we are presently working on Single Sign-On authentication via SAML 2.0 as a foundation of our authentication strategy.

5) Cloud storage isn’t for us, so neither is Creative Cloud

I have saved one of the most contentious myths for the end. First, there are always concerns from IT about files stored in the cloud and rightfully so. The “Adobe Creative Cloud Security FAQ for IT” doc covers a good portion of questions you or your organization might have about our cloud storage aspect of the Creative Cloud.

And for every CIO, CTO, or IT admin who tells me they are shrinking their data center and using more cloud services there is always a set of IT folks who tell me the opposite: My user’s data will never be in the cloud. To that I say: okay. No fight here. Seriously. You can’t turn off the cloud storage component for the Creative Cloud for teams, but there are ways of course for IT to control traffic and block ports. These are documented in the “Adobe Creative Cloud Network Endpoints” and “Controlling Access to Adobe Creative Cloud Services” docs.

And restricting storage access is certainly an option for the Creative Cloud for enterprise. Presently there is no identity login component for the Creative Cloud for enterprise so hence no accessibility to the cloud storage. When your organization begins to have access to the Creative Cloud via SSO then the IT admin will have access to an admin panel which will include granular levels of control over who has access to what applications, services and storage. Want to turn off storage? Okay. Want to give more storage to the marketing group. Okay. High levels of control for IT, is at the heart of my personal vision of the Creative Cloud for enterprise.

We’ll be more than happy to squash some more myths and answer questions in the comments. Or we can discuss who would win in a fight between Chupacabra or Moth Man. Your call.

Some of you awesome IT administrators will already be familiar with who I am, some of you may not but for the last few years I have been the Systems Engineer working with our customers on Enterprise Deployment Issues. You may also recognise me from such blogs as “The Many Uses of RUM”. What you may not know is that I am and have been for the last 4-5 months the Product Manager for the Enterprise IT Tools such as AAMEE, AUSST, RUM ,XDA & APTEE.

What happened to Jody Rodgers you may be asking ?

Has Adobe tried to silence him ?

Stop him in his tracks before he makes deploying Adobe software too easy for IT admins ?

Has he tried one last time to grow his hair, become cool and join Sigur Ros ?

No ! in fact he has been promoted to Senior Product Manager for Creative Cloud for Enterprise.

So with that said there is going to be some exciting times ahead and some great new tools. So let’s get started.

Adobe Creative Cloud for Team is a pretty awesome offering. You get all of Adobe’s applications, you get new feature bearing updates, shared storage, folder syncing & lots of other cool stuff.

However before now there was no great way to deploy the products to systems where users were not administrators. Our workaround was that you should download CS6 Master Collection from our FTP Server and package with AAMEE 3.1 but this was certainly not ideal and not what AAMEE was designed for. So the team who brought you AAMEE is bringing you The Creative Cloud Packager a brand new tool which will in it’s first iteration allow you, as an administrator for a CC Team to download directly from the application all of the Creative Cloud Products & Updates (regular and feature), define custom installation behaviour and at the end have a native MSI or PKG that you use with your deployment tool to install on all machines you manage. Now just in case you missed that, this means no separate media download. WHOOOO

Some key points

If you have used the AAMEE workaround up till now you can still use CCP from now on.

CCP caches to a location of your choice and so if the applications and updates have not changed then you do not need to download the same bits again and again thus saving you some time.

CCP can be used to create an update only package by just selecting updates.

CCP produces an msi file for Windows which is also accompanied with a Setup.exe that can be used for manual execution on a single system basis, rather than deployment. The Mac pkg can also be double clicked.

There is a new version of Adobe Update Server Setup Tool 3.0 (AUSST) included with CCP. This has been changed from python to C++ and has significant benefits such as

-Reduced the amount of time it takes to perform initial and subsequent syncs

-Ability to set up cron jobs for automatic syncing and updating of repository

Remote Update Manager (RUM) is also now included in the package and copied to the client by default although this can be changed if you wish

This tool is live today and will be available to Creative Cloud Team administrators from the Team admin portal.

Headed to San Francisco next week for the MacIT/MacWorld event? Here are a few tips:

1) Ravens jerseys are not so popular at the moment in SF.

2) You shouldn’t leave town without going to the Mission and having a Papalote Mexican Grill burrito drenched in their amazing salsa. Or your mouth will resent you.

3) Adobe’s session on Thursday 4:45pm – 5:30pm will be THE best session of the entire conference.*

*Okay, so I just looked at the lineup and that statement might not be completely accurate. Chip Pearson from JAMF’s keynote is likely to be great. Oh, and I didn’t see that the likes of Rich Trouton and Randy Saeks are also speaking Thursday. Those guys are always good. So I guess I can’t even state that we’ll have the best session that day. Man, looks like on our time slot we are up against a DNS session that looks pretty good. And “iPads on Planes” sounds cool. Although seems like they missed their chance to call it “iPads on a Plane.” So okay, so let’s say the we will have one of the top 5 sessions at the conference during the Thursday 4:45pm – 5:30pm time period. Yes, I feel confident about that statement. Although I bet there might be some compelling conversations out in the hall during that time period.

In all seriousness we are really excited to be participating in the conference as a sponsor and getting to engage directly with the Mac IT community. Our session was initially entitled “Managing Adobe Software: Taking IT To The Next Level” but I’ve taken that Keynote presentation and I’ve Control clicked on it and chose Move To Trash. That’s right, I’ve scratched the whole talk so that we could bring you the latest info around managing the Creative Cloud. The new talk is called “What The Creative Cloud Means For IT.” What? You don’t have to manage the Creative Cloud yet in your environment? Well one great thing about conferences like this is the opportunity to stay ahead of the curve, to be the first on your block with the scoop, the 411, the…oh you get it. Plus we will have an unveiling of something new. And there will be prizes. Prizes!

And this year I will be joined on stage by the new Product Manager of the IT Tools, Karl Gibson… all the way from Dublin, Ireland. That is 5091 miles/8192km. Traveling 7689 miles/12,372km we have our QE Lead for the IT Tools, Rahul Baiswar, all the way from Delhi, India. And coming all the way from San Jose, California (wait, that is just a train ride away) is Eric Wilde, who is not only my fantastic guy and manager (it’s review time btw) but Eric is also my partner in internal advocacy for the Enterprise IT admin. We are all excited for the event and can’t wait to see old friends in the community and meet new ones.

Here’s the details of the season. Hope to see you there. Did I mention there was going to be prizes?

You are at your holiday party. You have had one, okay, more than one, glass of spiked eggnog. You are singing along to Wham!’s “Last Christmas” off key. Let’s face it, your judgement might be slightly impaired. And of course, as an IT admin, your goal is to avoid talking to your production manager at these type of events. Too late. He’s cornered you. Oh, that tie! Does he think he is being ironic wearing that Santa tie?

And the next day when you awake you have a slight flashback. What did I promise? Something about telling the production manager I would deploy Adobe’s Creative Cloud for teams before I left for my break. How can you package up and deploy the “cloud?” That doesn’t even make any sense. Oh my head. The nog!

Well I hope this blog will be your Rockstar Recovery drink to get you through this. First, let’s clarify a few things. First, the Creative Cloud for teams offering is different the Enterprise offering. We’ll have a few blog posts going into the Enterprise offering in 2013. This post is simply focused on what an IT admin who has to help roll out the Creative Cloud for teams can do with the existing Adobe IT tools like AAMEE and RUM to make things easier. We’ll be rolling out comprehensive documentation in January on this topic but want to give a quick overview.

Let’s say you are rolling out 50 seats of Creative Cloud for teams in your office. You may be involved with the actual administration of sending out invites. This is done through the admin portion of the Creative Cloud site. From the Invite Multiple option you can either copy and paste user’s email addresses (ouch! carpal tunnel) or import a .txt or .csv file of the user’s email address. Then you can send them an invite and they’ll login with or create an Adobe ID.

Then they’ll download and install the Creative Cloud version of the Adobe Application Manager and begin downloading and installing the full offering of Adobe’s Creative Cloud applications and updates. All of them. All of the apps. All at once. All 50 of the users. What? This is in your Portland office? The only office that hasn’t had the network upgrade yet. Better turn off your mobile stat and hide.

Now that scenario of course could be avoided if you used your existing deployment infrastructure by pushing out packages of the apps rather than using your office’s internet connection for all 50 users. But how do you package up a set of apps that come from the cloud? Ah, you need a work-a-round, a hack. Well my friend, as a former IT admin I am all about the hack. Here’s how you do it: The bulk of the applications they are downloading from the Creative Cloud are the CS6 installers and to be frank, are not exactly what I’d call svelte in the MB/GB department. So you could download them yourself from our FTP site as the CS6 Master Collection and then use AAMEE 3.1, our CS6 packager, to package them out and distribute them.

But wait, AAMEE requires a volume serial number, right? Well remember we also have a Trial workflow in AAMEE 3.1. And the Trial workflow is really an unlicensed version of the CS6 app, just waiting for licensing via a serial number or an Adobe ID login associated with a subscription or Creative Cloud membership. Get it? So once it is packaged up you can distribute using your deployment infrastructure and then have them log in after you send the invites. This turns the unlicensed CS6 app into a Creative Cloud app. Magic. More like magic hack.

A few caveats about this plan/hack are:
1) apps such as the Edge tools, Muse and Lightroom aren’t part of CS6 so the end-users will have to download those apps on their own. The Edge tools and Muse are quite lightweight in size though.
2) the updates that you package with AAMEE 3.1 will not fully get the applications up to date. Why? Because the Creative Cloud have their own special feature updates that are not part of CS6. Therefore they can’t be seen in the Updates screen with the CS6-based AAMEE 3.1. You could execute the Remote Update Manager (RUM) once the end user has signed into the application with a valid Creative Cloud account. Then when you run RUM it will recognize the install as a Creative Cloud app and then pull that Creative Cloud-specific update down and install it.

(There is obviously a joke opportunity in there with RUM and spiked eggnog but I am going to refrain. Not because I am opposed to stupid jokes. Anyone who has read this blog in the past knows that. But this is out of principal. And that is because I am in the camp that firmly believes eggnog only has one true friend. And that friend is from Loretto, Kentucky. I’ll say no more.)

If you have read through this blog post cursing me and saying things aloud saying things like “Don’t you know my end-users aren’t admins?” or “There is no way we would give our users access to whatever apps they want.” or “I don’t want my users to have to have Adobe IDs.” If that is the case, then we have an Enterprise version of the Creative Cloud that can accommodate your organization. Lots more info on this topic coming early 2013 including us previewing some cool new stuff at the Mac IT event in San Francisco which we are are a sponsor.

If you are not familiar with our FTP site, you can get to the CS6 installers by going here:

2nd UPDATE 3/6/13: Two issues with the workflow mentioned, both fairly major. First, the media that is on the FTP is not for North American English. We are working to get that posted on the FTP site. In the meantime, you can find the CS6 MC media from: http://www.adobe.com/downloads/

[Note: Getting media from that page requires the use of the Adobe Download Assistant which is very consumer focused. Sorry about that.]

Second, in order to have the ability to login properly with a Creative Cloud for Teams account the system needs to have the latest copy of Adobe Application Manager installed. Unfortunately the Adobe Application Manager can’t be packaged with AAMEE nor is it a native installer. I know, I know! Here are the links to the Adobe Application Manager files: